Impact of Hurricane Floyd and flooding in 1999

Dillahunt describes the impact of the flooding, wrought by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, on her family's tobacco farm. Dillahunt explains that not only did the family lose nearly everything, but they had no flood insurance. In addition, she describes how the flooding was so extensive that she and her husband were displaced for more than a month before they could return home to start rebuilding their lives. The devastating impact of the flooding on the Dillahunt family was an experience that many rural people shared.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Florence Dillahunt, May 31, 2001. Interview K-0580. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

They was doing okay before the flood. We weren't through
putting in tobacco when the flood come and we lost a lot. In fact, we
lost all of our crop except for all of the tobacco. We had put in maybe
over half of the tobacco we had put in when that flood come. Then after
thatߞ.

LEDA HARTMAN:

September.

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

Yes, we lostߞ. We had the barns full. We had a big trailer
load ready for the market. So we lost, we lost a
lot. We lost a lot. Sure did. And my house, I didn't have no
flood insurance on that. So I didn't get nothing there. So
that's how come we ain't got our house back.

LEDA HARTMAN:

Tell me what your house was like.

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

Well, it was a house. It was a five bedroom house. My mother had raised
all of us up in it. My daddy had enlarged it and then I had had it
remodeled. It was a pretty good house. Everybody liked to come. They
called it home. So when everybody got ready to come home, they come home
and that was the house they would come to. We had just had a family
reunion that year. Everybody had come home and we had a good time. Then
I turned around and lost everything.

LEDA HARTMAN:

How many people came to the reunion?

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

A lot of them. I guess there was over a hundred of them.

LEDA HARTMAN:

Over a hundred.

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

Yes.

LEDA HARTMAN:

And how old was the original house?

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

My house? That house must have beenߞ. I'm sixty-six
and my daddy had that house way before that. The house might have been
about a hundred years old, something like that.

LEDA HARTMAN:

Wow. Wow. So what were some of the things that you lost in the flood
that can't be replaced?

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

About everything I had was lost.

LEDA HARTMAN:

Things from your family?

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

Yes. My son come in on a boat and he did get a few, few of the pictures
that was hanging on the walls. He got a man that had a motor on a boat
to bring him in here. The water come in. Started coming in that Thursday
evening and we left out that Friday morning. They come in and rescued
us. So we lost all ourߞ. [The] only vehicles that we had
insurance on, that we could get replaced, was a truck and a car. All the
others, we didn't have nothing on that. We lost all of it. So
we was like three months getting back in here after we had the flood.
The water stayed in here so long. They said you could touch the top of
my house from the boat. And my house wasn't no low house. It
was tall. This little barn right back out here, we call the smoke house.
You just could see the top of it. I didn't ever come back in
here while the water was up, but other people did. And my son and him
coming here at that time, they took some pictures. And the boy told them
that they didn't need to come in here no more because the
water had such strong undercurrent in it and we had just gassed up all
the tanks to the barn, with gas because we weren't through
putting in tobacco. All of them tanks uplifted from the ground and all
that gas escaped. So he said they could have got blowed up. He told them
they need to stay out so they didn't get nobody to bring them
back in here no more.

LEDA HARTMAN:

What about your animals? Did you have animals then?

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

Yes. They got my dogs. The Humane Society come in on a boat. I come down
to the water on a Sunday and they had my dogs. They couldn't
get the cats. The cats went up in the trees. I
guess a lot of those got drowned, but there were still some here when we
come back. They didn't have nothing to eat.

BETTY HOWES:

That was three or four weeks before you could come back,
wasn't it?

FLORENCE DILLAHUNT:

Before I could come back in here? Longer than that. We
couldn't come back in here. We had the flood and then after
that, the water had started going out, I guess, about a month. And we
had another big rain because my husband and them had come back in here
on a tractor that they had got down low enough, he could drive the
tractor in. Then it got right [high?] again.